


In the Rain

by Who Shot AR (akerwis)



Category: V for Vendetta (2005)
Genre: Bittersweet, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Flashbacks, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, Loneliness, POV First Person, Prison, Rain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 04:08:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2798987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akerwis/pseuds/Who%20Shot%20AR
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Valerie still tells stories to herself, even if she isn't writing them down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Rain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Venturous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Venturous/gifts).



> Thank you to dancinbutterfly and pitseleh for betaing this fic.

I can no longer write.

I fell asleep with my pencil in my hand. A guard found it and took it away from me. I woke to him kicking me awake, and then dropped back into an unconsciousness so ugly, it could never be called sleep, when he pulled out his stun gun.

He has my pencil, but he doesn’t have my words. Those are hidden away in the wall, my toilet-paper autobiography pushed through a crack towards the person moaning in the cell next to mine. The rest—the ones still trapped in my head, like these—I've saved for myself. I've told myself all the stories I'll never write down.

I know I will never leave this place.

❧

“Damn,” said Ruth.

I raised my head sleepily from my pillow to find the mattress cold next to me. Ruth was already up and about, half-dressed and staring through the window at the grey sky outside. She’d always been better at mornings.

With a yawn, I pushed a tangle of hair back from my face. “What’s wrong?”

“Raining again.” She finished buttoning her shirt and dropped her hands to the windowsill, but everything about her body still seemed stiff—like a mannequin staring out a shop window. “You know, I think it’s rained every day we’ve had off for the last six months.”

“God is in the rain,” I answered, crawling out of bed. The taut energy in her limbs didn’t ease when I put my arms around her, nor when I rested my chin on her shoulder.

“You always say that.”

“My grandmother always said it.” So far as I knew, she still did.

My heart twinged at the thought of her; we hadn’t spoken much, the last few years. Not because of _her_ —Gran had always loved me, had taken me in back when I was seventeen, when my father told me to get out of his house—but because of me. First, I was busy. And then, I was worried.

A few months ago, Victor Danforth disappeared after the wrap party for Ruth’s latest film. He was the director, and there’d been articles printed about the film. Critics were already talking about his chances for a Best Director nomination from the Academy next year, and the picture wasn’t even finished yet. And Ruth—she was the star. I was so proud. Of both of them.

The morning after production wrapped, Vic’s partner called. They’d been split up, he said, in a crowd outside the pub we’d gone to after the official party. There’d been Fingermen about—there always were, these days—but it was hardly the first time they’d lost each other in a crowd. The only difference this time was the fact that Charlie hadn’t found Vic again after.

Ruth and I had gone home early. And all I could remember, after Ruth said goodbye, was how happy we all were the night before. Ruth’s film was going to be gorgeous, and we all knew it. I’d just been hired on to play Helena in a production of _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_. All talk of work aside, Vic and Charlie were coming up on their tenth anniversary and a holiday in the south of France. We didn’t speak so openly as _anniversary_ , not in public, but we knew. They’d been planning it for months.

By breakfast the next morning, everything had changed. In an instant, Vic had gone from one of Britain’s most promising directors to a question mark. Ruth and I wondered over toast what had happened to him, but even then, I think we knew. When we heard, a day later, that he’d disappeared into a black bag, I wasn’t surprised. Only heartbroken.

After that, every time I picked up the phone to ring Gran, I felt like I was drowning. What if I said the wrong thing?  We'd joked at work for months now that they must be listening to calls, following the soap-opera lives of working actors and picking over our latest gossip over lunch—but now, it seemed all too possible.  I used to tell her about my friends, about Ruth's work and my own.  I never _said_ the word "girlfriend"—even before Vic was taken away, I wasn't incautious—but we both knew who Ruth was to me.  How could I speak of any of this without drawing attention to our conversation?

It was bad enough to know people like me were under scrutiny, for no better reason than the people we loved. I couldn’t allow the government’s interest to be piqued by my grandmother, all because her granddaughter was someone who dared to care for another woman.

Ruth sighed, leaning back against me, and I kissed her jaw. Her skin was still the slightest bit damp from a shower she must have taken before I woke; her hair, rather more so, the scent of her mint and rosemary shampoo clinging to it. But nothing was more important than the way her shoulders no longer felt like iron beneath my touch. “What did she mean by it? ‘God is in the rain’?”

Hearing Gran reduced to the past tense was jarring—but perhaps Ruth had noticed I hadn’t mentioned her in ages. It still felt like bad luck, bringing up one of the two most important people in my life, the one who was hours away and growing frailer by the year, and talking about her as though she was gone.

(It’s all past now. They told me after I’d been processed—my hair shorn, my body blasted with scalding water, some unknown poison injected into my bicep—that Ruth killed herself two days after she gave them my name. That she was the reason they knew how to find me. I don’t know how they knew to find her.)

“She meant…” I fell silent, staring out the window at the rain-soaked street beyond our flat. Besides a stooped old man with an umbrella, staring at the parked cars and _STRENGTH THROUGH PURITY_ posters he passed, it was empty. “We look at rain, and we’re disappointed. Because I wanted to go for a walk with you, and you wanted to run errands without getting soaked walking to the shop. But rain has a purpose. It’s a part of this world like everything else. And whatever God is…we aren’t alone.”

“Do you think that’s true?” Ruth’s voice was a breath. I could feel the words forming where my cheek pressed against hers.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted, pressing another kiss near the corner of her mouth. “But I want to.”

“So do I.”

We stood there and watched raindrops tracing down the windowpane for a long time. I couldn’t let myself look further than the patterns on the glass—not when Ruth was worried and Norsefire propaganda loomed from the side of the next building. Even in our own bedroom, we couldn’t escape it. But that morning, watching the way the water slipped down towards the earth, wrapping my arms around her waist, was enough.

That night, it stopped raining long enough for Ruth to go out for groceries. I never saw her again.

❧

I don’t know if it’s a man or a woman next to me. (Cell five, I mean. I listened to them drag cell three’s body away some time ago.) I don’t know how old he or she is. In the darkness of these cells, we are sexless, ageless. But we are never without our humanity. That honor belongs to our guards.

Whoever it is, I hope the crack reaches their cell. The walls are too thick, and the space is too small, to try and feel for the end of the little hollow I pushed my story through. I hope they think to reach inside. I hope they have enough of their mind left to read the words.

I’d like it if someone read my life’s story, just once, before I die.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide! ♥
> 
> Thank you for giving me an opportunity to write about characters I love. I hope this fic evokes some of Valerie's love and admiration for her grandmother, as well as the lives Valerie and Ruth lived as Norsefire came to power.
> 
> I've also made you a fanmix for them, which ~~I will link you to once authors are revealed~~ you can find right here: [Someone will remember us: or, Love in the time of dystopia](http://8tracks.com/twohandedengine/someone-will-remember-us-or-love-in-the-time-of-dystopia).


End file.
